I concluded the previous post by writing about the time I met the pastor for the church on main street. I want to reiterate how strange of an experience it was. A man, full of worldly study and learning and with a college degree allowing him to become a minister, would hardly speak to or make eye contact with two 20 year old Mormon Missionaries. I'm sure that if he would have wanted he could have probably run us around in circles by using the Bible as his defense. At that time I wasn't very proficient in my knowledge of the book. Nevertheless, the pastor seemed to shrink back in fear and acted as though he wanted to fall through the floor so that he didn't have to face us. It was very bizarre.
One thing that came from this experience was a realization that I didn't know as much about the Bible as I wanted to and probably needed to. When someone is raised in a predominate LDS community they don't usually have people forcing different interpretation of the Bible down their throats, and so the study of that book is usually not forefront in one's mind. Sure, I learned about it in seminary, for a few minutes a day during one of the years I was in high school, but I didn't know it in depth. Mississippi, and Columbia especially, made me realize that this superficial knowledge of one of the fundamental books of Christendom was not going to cut it in a place that was filled with pastors and preachers. At this time I decided that I needed to really dive into the Bible, especially the New Testament, and learn what I needed to know. I focused on the New Testament mainly because the Old Testament is largely looked over in protestant churches. It is still regarded as important, but not nearly as important as the words of Jesus and the Apostles.
My original reason for diving into the Bible was that I wanted to be able to hold my own if a good old fashioned Bible Bash were to occur during our proselytizing. Granted, Bible Bashing has never accomplished much other than bringing anger and contention to a discussion, but I began my study preparing for such an incident. As I read I began taking notes of what I was reading. I would write down scriptures that supported the doctrines of Mormonism and, after a time, I realized that this information could be useful for other missionaries that I knew. I decided to organize this into a paper and titled it The 9 Points of the True Church (or whatever the number was). As I went on, and as we encountered more opposition to various doctrines of our faith, I realized that I needed to add more "points," and eventually I ended up with 29 points.
During my reading I realized that many of the words, as they were translated into English, seemed to lose some of their meaning. A great feature in current versions of the LDS Standard Works is that you will occasionally see HEB or GR in the footnotes of certain verses. HEB stands for Hebrew and is found in the Old Testament while GR stand for Greek and is found in the New Testament. I began to see these footnotes showed that there were different meanings that what was written in the English so I decided I needed help in knowing what those words were. This is when I decided to pick up a Hebrew and Greek concordance at a local Christian book store. It had the original Hebrew and Greek translations for every word in the King James Bible, and it was an amazing asset. (There is a link to it at the bottom of my blog)
I worked on this paper for a good 10 months of my mission. I would use various computers that I came across to work on it. I wanted to type it so that it could be easily read and printed, and soon the document was 16 full pages of text. I decided that was too many to print out, as I was rather poor at the time, so I made the font size considerably smaller in order to make it cheaper to print. Unfortunately my eyes cant see 8 point font that well any longer and I have since changed it back to 12 point font. I also decided to start each new "point" (now labeled "doctrines" in the document) on a new page and the entire document is now around 40 pages long.
This document gave me an extreme feeling of confidence in the fact that I knew I could both defend the doctrines of the LDS church (with only the Bible) and, if anyone brought up some superfluous argument, I would have a good rebuttal. I gave this document to other missionaries as well as some converts to the church, and it proved useful to many of them many times. One convert even stated that he used it to defend himself when a coworker said that Mormons are crazy because they believe in such and such a thing. It was nice to know that my work had brought help. I am also cautious to note that I realize that this work was not entirely my doing. I am certain that I received a significant amount of help in both finding the information and in organizing it properly. I look at the document now and know for sure that I could not have done it on my own.
Unfortunately, I was never able to deliver this document to the pastor. In fact, I was never able to tell him how wrong he was about us. I was never able to bear my testimony of Jesus Christ to him, of testify of prophets and apostles being called again after a long night of apostasy. I wasn't able to bear my witness as an ordained minister of Christ and that has always bothered me. But, I finally got my chance and I will relate my interaction with the pastor in following posts.
the suspense is killing me.
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